I have been attuned to trees since I was a young child and as a Gaia Method healer, trees play a huge part. One of the things that happens, as you move forward on this particular training path is that you become, energetically, a tree, or at least part of your energy does.  Sometimes during meditation or earthwork you see yourself as a tree, sometimes with fruit hanging from your branches. Now apart from the obvious analogy of the fruit representing our gifts, our nourishment and seeds of information that we give back to the world, I have never really been clear about why we become trees specifically. Why not grapevines or daffodils? So I have been asking ‘upstairs’ for more information, and, as often happens, I find it in a Seth book! So this is from The Early Session, Book 1. Which I am reading now for the first time. I love the Seth material. It has been the foundation stone of my own personal journey for many years. This is some of what Seth says about trees. While you’re reading it, connect to your ‘tree-ness’ and see how it applies.

Seth, The Early Sessions. Trees.

The tree is of course dissociated in one manner. In some ways, its living forces and consciousness are kept to a minimum. It is in a state of drowsiness on the one hand, and on the other hand, it focuses its usable portion of energy into a being a tree. The state of consciousness involved here is dull as compared to the highly differentiated human ability in many ways.

However, in some other manners, the experiences of the tree are extremely deep, dealing with the inner senses which are, and properly, also properties of freedom. The inner senses of the tree have strong affinities with the properties of earth itself. They feel their growing. They listen to their growing as you listen to your own heartbeat. They experience this oneness with their own growth, and they also experience pain. The pain, however, while definite, unpleasant and sometimes agonising, is not of an emotional nature in the same way as you might experience pain.

In some ways, it is an even deeper thing. The analogy may not be a perfect one, far from it, but it is as if your breath were to be suddenly cut off. In a manner, this somewhat approximates pain to a tree. The tree makes adjustments as you make adjustments, the tree listens to its growth up from the earth and listens also to the murmur of the growth of its roots beneath. It adjusts each root ending according to whatever impediments might lie in its way. Without the so-called mind of man, it nevertheless retains its inner consciousness of all its parts above and below the ground and adjusts them constantly.

The tree is also aware of its innerly environment to an astonishing degree. It maintains contact awareness and the ability to manipulate itself in two completely different worlds, so to speak, one in which it meets with little resistance growing upward and one which composed of much heavier elements, into which it must grow downward.  Man needs artificial methods, for example, to operate effectively on land or in water, but the so-called unconscious tree manages very well in two worlds as diverse say as land and water, and makes itself part of each.

As far as motion is concerned he moves both upwards and downward, it is quite unfair so say that it cannot transport itself since it does so to an amazing degree, the roots and limbs moving in all directions.

The inner senses of all plant life are well attuned, alert and very important. All of these fragments (of a soul) have consciousness to a rather high degree, considering that man holds them in such ill repute.

If you remember what it is to be in a light trance state, you are able to maintain an awareness of yourself, your environment and your place in it. You simply behave somewhat differently, not bestirring yourself in any direction unless the suggestion to do so has been given. The awareness of plant life lies somewhat along these lines. In a deep trance, there is oblivion afterwards; that is the subject, though fully aware of what is going on while in trance, can remember nothing of it afterwards. The awareness of plant life is also like the awareness of a subject in deep trance. Except for the suggestion and stimulus received by regular natural forces on your plane, the plant life does not stir itself in other directions. But like the subject in trance, our plant is aware. Its other abilities lie unused for the time and latent, but are present.

The awareness is focused along certain lines. The energy is likewise focussed. Much of the ability again is suspended, as for a subject in trance, but consciousness is present.

There is consciousness in everything, visible to you, or invisible, every fragment of the Universe has a consciousness of its own. Pain and pleasure, the strongest aspects of all consciousness, are experienced strongly by every fragment, according to its degree. In some fragments, such as much plant life and vegetative life, there is strong use of certain inner senses. Rocks are vegetative and far from lifeless. Other types of life, including your own, rely on recognised, outer senses. The ideal, of course, is a consciousness that is adept at using both the inner and outer senses fully.

Your tree lives through its inner senses, experiencing many sensations and reacting to many stimuli of which you are unaware. Minute earth tremors, and even the motion of small ants about its lower trunk are recognised and experienced by tree consciousness. Such invisibilities such as humidity, radioactivity, and all electrical earthly values, are felt as quite real things by your tree and recognised as being separate from the tree itself. A tree knows a human being also. Not only, for example, by the weight of a child upon its branches, but by the vibrations in the air as adults pass, which hit the tree’s trunk at various distances but even by such things as voices.

In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was therefore, a natural law of the universe. Not only do these so-called laws, which are not laws, vary depending on where you are in the Universe, they also vary depending on what you are in the Universe. Therefore, your tree recognises a human being, though it does not see the human being in your terms. To a tree, the laws are simply different. And if a tree wrote its laws of the Universe, then you would know how different they are.

A tree does not even build up an image of a man, it builds up a composite sensation which represents say an individual man. And the same tree will recognise the same man as it passes by it each day. They deal with finer distinctions than you know now, being somewhat of the nature of your body’s ability to sense another person’s aggression. As your body senses temperature changes, so it also senses the psychic charge not only of other human beings, but believe it or not, of animals, and to a lesser extent, it senses the psychic charge of plants and vegetative matter.

Your tree builds up a composite of sensations of this sort, sensing not the physical dimensions of the material object, whatever it is, but the vital psychic information in and around it. Size, however, is sensed by a tree, perhaps because of its inherent concern with height. The abilities in the tree are latent in man as are the abilities latent in the tree.

Man’s ego causes him to interpret everything else in light of himself. He loses very much in this manner. The ego is definitely an advancement, but it can be compared to the bark of a tree, in many ways. The bark of a tree is extremely vibrant and flexible, and grows with the growth beneath. It is a tree’s contact with the outer world, the tree’s interpreter and to some degree the tree’s companion.

So should man’s ego be. When man’s ego turns instead into a shell, when instead of interpreting outside conditions, it reacts too violently against them, then it hardens, becomes an imprisoning form that begins to snuff out important data and to keep enlarging information from the inner self. The purpose of the ego is protective. It is also a device to enable the inner self to inhabit the physical plane. It is the physical manifestation of the inner self, but it is not meant to snuff out the inner self.

If, for example, our tree bark grew fearful of the stormy weather and began to harden itself against the elements, in a well-meaning bur distorted spirit, then the tree would die. The sunlight, and so forth, could never penetrate. The sap could not move upward for the tree would solidify through and through, trying all the while to protect, and killing the tree with its obsessive kindness. This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data on your plane. As a result, it stiffens, and you have the cold detachment with which you face the world.

The idea of dissociation could be likened to the slight distance between the bark and the inside of the tree. Here we do not have a rigid bark as you should not have a rigid ego. We have instead a flexible bark changing with the elements, protecting the inner tree or inner self, but flexible, opening up or closing in rhythmic motion. The bark is, so to speak, outside our tree; and there is a small space between the inner tree and the bark. This small space is our dissociation.

The inner tree continues to grow because the bark is flexible. Man lets his ego face the outer world, as does the tree bark, and this is its purpose. Nevertheless, the inner self, like the inner tree, must have room to expand. The tree bark makes allowances for good weather, though bad weather is repulsive to the bark. Nevertheless, the bark makes whatever adjustments are necessary, and is flexible. It bends with the wind. It does not bend when there is no wind. Nor does it solidify, stopping the flow of sap to the treetop for fear the dumb tree, not knowing what it was up to, would bump its head against the sky.

Neither should the ego react so violently that it remembers and reacts to past storms whilst in the midst of clear and sunny weather. You know that such a tree bark would be death to a tree. It is equally ridiculous to act as if it is a summer’s day when in fact the snow is falling. The tree has enough sense not to show blossoms in the middle of a blizzard.

When you are overly concerned with physical matters, and even vital physical matters, you pull yourself in. And more ridiculous, you pull up your roots. A tree would never pull up its roots. I am not speaking now of pulling up your roots and moving from one location to another. I am speaking of something akin to cutting off your roots from any nourishment whatsoever. The inner self is nourished by many springs. To cut off one is a danger, but to cut off many is disastrous, and prevents any sort of practicality since half of your abilities will not be used.

Topmost photo credit:  by Chris Bishop in St. Cross Hospital, Winchester.